Something moved upstairs, scraping on the floorboards. Involuntarily, she glanced at the ceiling. The room above, the spare room, the one where Hike’s stuff was still piled up awaiting the day when he or one of his friends would collect it. She strained to hear more, thinking, hoping, she had misheard some other sound, perhaps from outside. Then again: a muffled scraping noise, apparently on the bare boards above.
She emitted another involuntary, inarticulate noise: a sob, a croak, a cry of fear. Propelled by the fright that was coiled inside her, but at the same time managing to suppress it somehow, adrenaline-charged, she ran two steps at a time up the stairs. She went straight to the door of the spare room, threw it open and pressed her hand hard against the light-switch inside. She went in.
Familiar chaos filled the room, the remaining debris of Hike’s departure. His uncollected stuff had been pushed against one of the walls: piles of paper, canvases, pots, boxes. His broken computer scanner and a tangle of cables. Three large crates of vinyl records and CDs. That bloody music he played so loud when she had been trying to work. Two suitcases she had never opened, but which she assumed contained some of his clothes. Shelves where he had stacked his stuff, but not books – these were the only shelves in the house that were not crammed with books. This was the only room without books. Hike was not a reader, and had never understood why she was.
There were other traces of him everywhere, reminders of him, his endless presence in the house, the upset he had caused her almost from the first week, later the resentment, finally the anger, the days and weeks of pointlessly wasted time, all the early curiosity about him lost, the endless regrets about letting him move in and set up a studio, the feeling of being invaded, of trying to make the relationship work, even at the end.
Nothing in the room had been moved or interfered with and nothing had apparently been taken. The window was wide open as she had left it that morning, but the wind was blowing in from the sea. She pushed it closed, and secured it. There was a cupboard door hanging open, a glimpse of the dim interior beyond. Still fired up by anger and fear, she strode across the room, stepped past Hike’s cases and pulled the door fully open.
The cupboard was empty. The rack where his clothes had hung, the shelves where he had crammed his messy things, were all vacant. Nothing in there. Just a paperback book, tossed down so that its cover was curled beneath the weight of the pages.
She picked it up: it was Douglas Dunn’s Elegies. It must be her copy – Hike had no interest in poetry. She straightened the cover and gently riffled the pages of the book, as if comforting a pet animal that had been hurt. Holding it in her hand she left the room, but deliberately did not switch off the light. She now had an aversion to unlighted rooms, dark corners.
The light on the landing had gone out while she was in Hike’s room. She turned it on again, only half-remembering if she had switched it off herself as she dashed upstairs to this floor. Why should she have done that? It made no sense.
The room next to Hike’s was her own sitting room, a room set aside for reading, with more books, hundreds more books. There were shelves on three of the walls, floor to ceiling, a large and comfy armchair which she had bought as a treat for herself after Piet died, a reading lamp, a footstool, a small side table. A desk with papers and a portable typewriter she sometimes used if she didn’t want to break off and go downstairs to the computer. The room had a closed, concentrated, comfortable feeling. She remembered Hike’s derision when he saw the room the day he moved in. He said it was middle-class, bourgeois. No, it’s just where I like to sit. The room had become a sort of battleground after that, a minor but constant aggravation to Hike. After he left, she realized that she had frequently found herself making excuses to be in here, to explain that which could not be explained to someone who would never understand.
She was glad he was gone, glad a hundred times, now a hundred and one. She never wanted him back, no matter what.
She glanced around the room: it was lit only by her reading lamp, but everything seemed to be untouched. Just books everywhere, as she liked them to be, in their familiar but comprehensible jumbles. She pressed the Dunn into a space on a shelf beside the door, preoccupied still with her worries, not noticing or caring which books she placed it beside.
She went next to the bathroom. Three of her books lay on the floor beneath where the glass cubicle door overhung the rim of the shower cubicle. They were three recently published hardback novels she had reviewed for a magazine a month before, and which she expected would have a resale value to a dealer. How had they come into the bathroom, though? She never took books in there.
She picked them up, examined them for damage. As far as she could see no harm had been done by water dripping on them. She opened the top one, and immediately discovered that it was upside-down. The paper dust-wrapper had been removed and put back on the wrong way round.
The other two books were the same.
Melvina stood on the landing outside her reading room, replacing the dust-wrappers one by one. She felt her throat constricting again – her hands were shaking. She could not look around, fearful of everything now in the house.
She took a step into her reading room, and placed the books on the shelf near Elegies. She backed out of the room without looking around too closely, horribly aware that something in there had been changed and she did not like to think what, nor look too closely in case she found out.
Hairs on her arms were standing upright. She was sweating – her blouse was sticking to her body under her armpits, against her back. But she was now determined to finish this. She climbed the final flight of stairs to the top floor of the house. She went to her sewing room first, under the eaves, with a dormer window looking out towards the road. The bluewhite glare fell on the car parked close to her house. It looked like Hike’s car, but then most cars did.
She checked the room for any sign of intrusion. It was here she kept her sewing table
with the machine, the needlepoint she had been working on for a year or more, the various garments she had been meaning to get around to repairing. There was a wardrobe, and in that she kept the old clothes she was planning to take one day to a charity shop. Some of those clothes were Hike’s.
The unshaded lightbulb threw its familiar light across everything – there was no one in the room, nowhere that anyone could be hiding.
Finally, quickly, she went to her bedroom. This was the room with the best view of the sea. She had originally planned it to be her office, but once she moved in she realized she would be distracted by staring out all day.
She turned on the central light, went straight in, saw her reflection in the largest pane of the window. She paused just inside the door, remembering. Hike had tried to change this room, said it was too feminine. He hated lace, frills, cushions, things he deemed to be womanly. He never found out that for the most part she did too, and that there was no trace of them, never had been. It had not stopped him criticizing. He did move the bed away from the wall where she had initially placed it, because, he said, he did not want to fall over her stuff if he had to get up in the night.
Melvina planned to move the bed back soon, but she wanted to put up more bookshelves before she did. Money was tight, so she had been delaying.
Everything she remembered of Hike was negative, unpleasant, rancorous. How had it happened? Since he left she had grown so accustomed to being weary of him that she had to make a conscious effort to remember that Hike Tommas had once been eagerly welcome in her life. The early days had been exciting, certainly because they brought an end to the long aftermath of Piet’s death. Hike intrigued her. His wispy beard, his hard, slim body, and his abrasive sense of humour, all were so unlike genial Piet. Hike changed everything in her life, or tried to. His opinions – they soon became a regular feature, his attitude to life, his harsh judgments on others, a constant undercurrent of ill-feelings, but at first she found his reckless views on other artists and writers stimulating and entertaining. Hike did not care what he said or thought, which was refreshing at first but increasingly tiresome later. Then there were the paintings he executed, the photographs he took, the objects he made. He was good. He won awards, had held an exhibition at a leading contemporary art gallery, was discussed on the arts pages of broadsheet newspapers. And the physical thing of course, the need she had, the enjoyment of it. They had done that well together. They made it work, but the more it worked the more it came to define what it was she disliked about him. She hated the noises he made, the obscene words he uttered when he climaxed, the way he held her head to press her face against him. Once she gagged and nearly suffocated as he forced himself deep into her mouth, but it did not stop him doing it again the next time. Hike was always in a hurry about sex. Get it over with, he said, then do it again as soon as possible.